


River of Bees

by aderyn



Series: Compounds or Stars [19]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221b, ASiB, Beekeeping, Gen, if this were the last night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-06
Updated: 2012-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-01 13:18:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's late; where's John? Gone out, she says...</p>
<p>Sherlock:  a wasp (hymenoptera, suborder apocrita) struggling in sap. That’s how it is when he can’t think, slowed (100-million-year-old proto-bee; discovered not long ago in Burma) by a humid slice of the Cretaceous."</p>
            </blockquote>





	River of Bees

**Author's Note:**

> Title from W.S. Merwin.

_"We are the echo of the future_

_On the door it says what to do to survive_

_But we are not born to survive_

_Only to live."--W.S. Merwin, "The River of Bees"_

 

Her skin hums like a hive, her nails honey in the fire. It’s nineteen past one. It’s twenty past one. It’s late; where’s John?  Gone out, she says. 

( _The honeybee can maintain a fixed angle between its line of flight and a line to the sun, transpose the solar angle onto the gravitational_ ): It’ll be later when John lands home.

Sherlock: a wasp ( _hymenoptera, suborder apocrita_ ) struggling in sap. That’s how it is when he can’t think, slowed ( _100-million-year-old proto-bee; discovered not long ago in Burma_ ) by a humid slice of the Cretaceous.

I don’t understand, he says, though he does.

She almost looks waxen. But there’s that current thrumming in her wrist, and veining there like the veins of wings, the exoskeletons he’s often admired. (In a natural history, up on the shelf;oh where is John with that book of theirs, the one that’ll ferry all of their tales?)

They’ll be interrupted--not by extinction, by Mrs. Hudson—but for just one moment, he’s not where he is, suspended between flights, but drunk on what feels like daylight,with the city all gone to seed in the back garden, the air a drowsy, settled hum…

John’s gone out, electrostatic.  But any second he’ll burst back through the door, carrying with him a flash of the future, the flower, the bloom.


End file.
